


A Room Without Doors

by Lexalicious70



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Other, Quentin is a fucking mess, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 21:16:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13443555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexalicious70/pseuds/Lexalicious70
Summary: Summary: When tragedy strikes Quentin and he becomes consumed by grief, Eliot must find a way to break through it and stop his friend from making a mistake that may cost him his life.





	A Room Without Doors

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s Notes: I don’t own The Magicians, they own me. This is just for therapy. Comments and kudos are magic! Enjoy.

**A Room Without Doors**

Lexalicious70

 

“Have any of you seen Quentin?”

 

Margo, Penny, Alice and Kady glanced up from the spell book they were leafing through. Outside of the circle of light cast by a nearby floor lamp, the Physical Kids cottage common room was dark. Margo pushed back a long section of her mahogany-colored hair.

 

“Eliot. You know what he told us. He doesn’t want to talk, he doesn’t need therapy, and he wants to be alone. Don’t you think we should respect that?”

 

“And since when do you respect anyone’s wishes?” Eliot snapped as he twisted a hand and snapped a finger. The lights over the cottage bar flickered on and the tall magician went to fill up a flask with scotch.

 

“Margo’s right.” Alice put in. “We can’t help him with this. Sometimes people have to work through their own grief, Eliot. Trust me on this.” She adjusted her glasses with one hand. “You can’t push him.”

 

“We can’t just leave him to face this alone, either! Good God . . . are we his friends or not?”

 

“He’s shut down tight, man.” Penny looked up from the spellbook, his dark eyes onyx in the room’s low light. “I’m sure if he needed us, he’d be here.”

 

Eliot looked over the group and then glanced out the window. It was well past sunset, which meant Quentin could be wandering anywhere in the darkness, numb with grief and anger. Eliot tucked the flask into his vest. Margo looked up at him.

 

“Come on, El. Stay here with us, help us figure out this cooperative spell. We’ll be able to make portals with half the effort if we get it right! Morocco . . . Madrid, the Greek islands?”

 

“No. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate.” He took a step back as Margo grabbed for his hand.

 

“El—”

 

“I’m going.” Eliot turned and swept out the door, telekinetically pulling it shut as he headed down the footpath that led to the wide field most students called The Sea. On the other side, the Brakebills classrooms and common areas loomed in the darkness. Quentin had secluded himself there, in a forgotten room of the smaller library, when he’d gotten the news about his father Ted’s brain cancer diagnosis a month earlier.

 

Eliot knew that since then, Quentin had been steeling himself against the inevitable, but nothing could have prepared him from the note from admin he’d gotten two days earlier, which bore the news that Ted Coldwater had committed suicide. While the details weren’t completely clear, the suicide note the Brooklyn police had delivered to Quentin had been full of apologies—to Quentin, to his ex-wife, Quentin’s mother, off somewhere in Italy on a painter’s sabbatical, to his doctor, who, Ted admitted, had done his best. Once Ted finished the note, he’d pinned it to the outside of his bedroom door, sat down against the foot of his bed, and ate the barrel of a .22 rifle he’d kept in his closet. It was his way of not letting the cancer win and to depart on his own terms.

 

While Eliot could understand wanting the control and not letting some terrible disease eat away at you until there was nothing left but a shell, he couldn’t understand how Ted could put this kind of trauma on his son, a young man who struggled with depression and anxiety and who would undoubtedly put the blame for his father’s suicide on himself. It wasn’t fair, it was selfish, and there were moments where Eliot felt a hate for Ted Coldwater that was as bitter as pine pitch.

 

_Sure, you’re out of it._ Eliot thought to himself. _But where does that leave your son?_

A rhythmic, tapping sound brought Eliot out of his thoughts and saw a figure looming out of the darkness. It was Gretchen, a girl from Quentin’s class. She walked with a cane because of a genetic issue that affected one of her legs and claimed her lameness was the source of all her magic. Eliot didn’t know her well, but he admired her claiming of the handicap as something strong and powerful instead of allowing it to turn her into a victim.

 

“Gretchen, hey.” Eliot said as they met on the path. The dark-haired girl looked up at him.

 

“Eliot, hi. Are you looking for Quentin?”

 

Eliot cocked a brow at her perceptiveness.

 

“Yes, actually. You’ve seen him?” He asked, and an empathetic expression crossed the girl’s face—news of Ted Coldwater’s death and its circumstances had spread quickly around campus, Eliot surmised.

 

“Well, not really but I saw a light on in one of the windows of the old PA classroom when I went around for a smoke. The one they moved us out of after—you know. What happened to the Dean and all. It could be him.”

 

“Thanks, Gretchen.” Eliot withdrew a silver cigarette case from his vest, popped it open, and her passed two silk-cut French cigarettes, which she accepted with a nod before stepping around him and heading back up the path toward the dorms. Eliot continued on his way, tucking the case back into his vest.

 

_The old PA room. My God, after what he saw in there, after what touched him, what fucking reason would he have to go back there?_ Eliot asked himself. He reached the classroom’s double doors and used a transparency spell to move through them. He reached the other side and dropped the spell, ignoring the shiver of momentary tiredness it caused before heading down the silent hallways. The old PA classroom was toward the back of the building and had been taped off and warded shut since the day the creature from another world attacked Quentin, Dean Fogg and Professor March. However, as Eliot turned the corner and approached the door, he found the tape tangled like a pile of plastic intestines at its foot. The wards were gone as well, and Eliot frowned as he nudged the door open. A strong smell of ozone and energy assaulted his nose, and the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stood up.

 

_Whatever is going on in here, it’s not good._

The room stood in the glow of a miniature sun, which hovered above the room’s metal tables. Most of the student desks had been cleared away, along with the mirror Penny had shattered that day, but most of the classroom’s equipment remained. Quentin stood at one of the tables, his hands dark with what looked like ash, soot, and something sticky and thick. Bottles, grinding dishes, and spell ingredients were scattered across three of the tables, and Quentin was breathing hard as he stood stooped over one of the dishes. In the light from the little sun, Eliot noted his friend’s tangled tawny hair, the roots dark with oil, dark bruises from the punches of lost sleep under his eyes, and the way his hands shook as he dropped some ingredients into the dish. The air around him vibrated, and it was then Eliot recognized the spell—one that was powerful enough to rewind time. Unpredictable and dangerous, it was one an experienced magician would have trouble performing correctly, let alone a first-year who had only been practicing magic for a few weeks. Eliot charged forward, raising his hands to scrub the spell, and Quentin looked up. His dark eyes looked hollow but somehow full of a manic energy.

 

“No!” He screamed as he saw Eliot’s fingers working to undo the blossoming spell, and the air around the table seemed to inhale before rippling outward. Eliot grunted as he was knocked backward against a table and Quentin cried out again, this time in dismay, as the spell he’d created collapsed. The charge of energy left the air and Eliot closed his eyes in relief. Another sound began to fill the air, a siren sound, and it took Eliot a moment to realize that Quentin was making it. He stood stooped over the metal table, his mouth open, the wail emanating from his throat in a one-note song that raised goosebumps on Eliot’s arms. He took a few steps toward his friend.

 

“Quentin—” He began, and the younger magician went silent as quickly as he had begun to wail. He raised his head, and fury ignited a wild light in his dark eyes.

 

“You!” He snapped. “You—you fucking bastard!” Quentin rushed him, both fists raised over his head as if he meant to beat Eliot over the head despite their difference in height. Eliot raised his arms to shield himself as Quentin closed the distance between them and rained blows on his forearms and wrists. “You fucking asshole, I almost had it, I almost had it working, who the fuck do you think you are, you wrecked it, you fucking wrecked it!”

 

“You didn’t have anything, except for a way to blow yourself into tiny pieces—Quentin!” Eliot finally managed to reach out and snag Quentin’s wrists. Something sticky smeared across his fingers and he looked down. Half-dried blood, tacky and smeared, covered Quentin’s lower palms and painted the cuffs of his grey sweater with small Rorschach patterns that were still damp. Eliot frowned. “What the hell have you done to yourself, Q?” He rucked up the worn sleeves and his stomach clenched as he found half a dozen slashes across Quentin’s forearm, each of them different lengths and depths. “Jesus . . .”

 

Quentin jerked away and turned back toward the table.

 

“I have to start over.” He said, as if Eliot hadn’t spoken. “I think I have enough left. I have to have enough left!”

 

“Quentin, don’t.” Eliot went over to him. “I know what you’re trying to do, and time spells never end well. Not only that, but the one you’re trying is way out of your league. You’re going to hurt yourself. Let me take you to the infirmary, we’ll get those cuts looked at.”

 

“No! No, I need to try again.” Quentin gathered some of the spell ingredients, including a small metal bowl, its bottom dark with drying blood.

 

“No you don’t, because it’s going to get you expelled—if you even survive casting it!” Eliot turned and swept everything off the table. The bowl and the rest of the ingredients smashed to the floor, tainted and useless. Quentin stared at them and then fell to his knees, his pale hands flying to his hair like buckshot doves, where they curled into tight, pulling fists.

 

“No. No no nonononono . . .” He moaned, and Eliot crouched down next to him.

 

“I’m sorry, Q. I’m sorry about all of it. But there’s no way you can cast that spell and I can’t stand here and watch you kill yourself over something you can’t fix!”

 

“But I can fix it! If you’d let me try, I can rewind time and I can stop it, I can stop . . .” Quentin’s words dissolved into a meaningless jumble of sounds and Eliot reached out to try and untangle Quentin’s fingers from his dirty hair.

 

“Quentin.”

 

“Why?” Quentin asked suddenly. “Why would he . . . he’d already stopped accepting the treatments, he didn’t have to—I was right here, he could have come to me, we could have talked, we—” Quentin closed his eyes. “It’s all so fucking pointless!” He shouted, and Eliot nodded.

 

“I know. But you can’t stop it, Q. You can’t stop him from dying. You have to know that it’s not your choice. Your dad took control of the end of the life the only way he could. You have to let that be or it’s going to drive you crazy.”

 

Quentin wiped a shaking hand across his eyes.

 

“Do you remember what the dean told us, about searching for the reason for the existence of magic? That it’s like spending your life trying to trace the form of some massive cosmic snake, only to get to the end and find it had swallowed its own tail?”

 

Eliot took his flask from his pocket and put an arm around Quentin’s shoulder, pulling him closer despite the odor of bitter spell ingredients, blood, and his friend’s lapse of hygiene.

 

“I remember.” He took a sip from the flask and passed it to Quentin, who gripped it with both hands but didn’t drink right away.

 

“That’s what this is. My whole life, I’ve been able to find answers for things. Whether it was some complicated calculus problem or finding a way out from under my own fucked-up emotions, I always found out why.” He shook his head. “But not this time. I don’t have any answer to why. The short answer is that he didn’t want to face the pain and indignity of the cancer.” He paused to take a long pull from the flask.

 

“Is there another why?” Eliot asked, and Quentin looked up at him.

 

“Yeah.” The word cracked in half. “Why didn’t he think about me? Why didn’t he think about how I’d have to identify him, how I’d have to arrange to have everything cleaned up? Why wasn’t me being his son enough to stop him? And why can’t I stop feeling like I could have stopped it if I had just gone to see him more? I could have stopped it, El, and I didn’t because I didn’t know how to talk about what was happening to him, I ran away and now he’s dead and I’m never going to have any fucking answers!” Quentin’s head dropped into his arms and his shoulders began to shake. Eliot turned to lean against the wall and then scooped Quentin up as if he was a tired child. He settled the smaller man into his lap and Quentin turned his head to sob against Eliot’s chest. Eliot tucked Quentin’s head under his chin and closed his eyes. He knew platitudes and waxing philosophical about death would do his friend no good, nor would trying to answer his whys.

 

“There was no.” Quentin said finally, and Eliot stroked a hand over Quentin’s hair.

“No what, Q?”

 

“When I went to—to the coroner’s office. There was no . . . they’d put a towel over his forehead and back over his head because—because the top of his head was gone. It was all.” The end of the sentence tangled on tears and Eliot sighed.

 

“I’m so sorry, Quentin. Not knowing the answers to the really important questions is the universe not giving a shit how much you’re hurting. And you may never know what your father was thinking or feeling when he chose to pull that trigger, but maybe that’s not what’s important.” He slipped a hand under Quentin’s chin and tilted his head upward so they were eye to eye. “But here’s something that is—he knew the most important thing about you before he died. He knew, and he was proud of it, and not all of us here can say that. I know I can’t. So maybe why he was proud and why he loved you is more important than why he chose to die the way he did.”

 

Quentin sniffled and wiped a hand across his face.

 

“I thought maybe if I could rewind time, I could do things differently.”

 

“Time spells don’t come with a guarantee, Q. No magic does. Neither does life, now that I think on it. But there are a few things you can count on.”

 

“Like what?” Quentin asked, making no move to remove himself from Eliot’s lap.

 

“Well, like the fact that I’ll always have the cottage bar stocked with high-grade alcohol, that Margo will always mock how you dress, talk, and act while secretly admiring the love you have for magic, and, as I have told you in the past—” Eliot brushed away the last of Quentin’s tears with a gentle stroke of his thumb. “—You are not alone here.”

 

“Thank you, El.” Quentin replied before trying to pat down his tangled hair. “Shit . . . I’m a mess.” He said after a moment, and Eliot nodded before shifting the younger man off his lap.

 

“You are in dire need of a bath. Come on, I’ll let you use my private tub and we’ll see what we can do about those cuts, too.”

 

“Wait, what? You have a private bathtub?” Quentin asked as he got to his feet, and Eliot smiled.

 

“Well. Not that Henry or any of the staff know about.” A wave of his hand and disciplined telekinetic energy had the lab clean a few moment later, and Quentin felt his throat close with gratitude. Eliot accepted the wordless thanks and put a hand on his shoulder as they left the lab together. Once they were outside and heading across The Sea, Quentin glanced up at the night sky. Stars wheeled over their heads and Quentin closed his eyes a moment, giving up his whys to those glittering points of light and allowing the reassuring anchor of Eliot’s scent and presence guide him back to the path of reason.

_You are not alone here._

_FIN_

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
